@MF: One aspect you missed... Corporates who are constantly looking for ways to stimulate market demand for music and adopting a "let's create a new distribution format/medium that will obsolete prior media and generate additional sales".
This started with CD (which promised "perfect sound - forever") being released and with a parallel driving down of LP production... Many early adopters of CD believed the slogan and ditched their LPs to re-buy the same titles on CD).
Then along came SACD and DVD-A which tried to emulate the tactics used to kick-start CD sales but failed.
Then there came iTunes and look-alikes which took into account the emerging "download generation" and CD sales started to slide downhill fast.
Highly compressed digital audio was not good enough for the audio freaks among us and their clamour for better SQ saw hi-res downloads enter the fray.
Each of these new media formats was an attempt by the corporates to repeat the "success" enjoyed by CD in its growth at the expense of vinyl - but, unfortunately for them, the market had been bitten a few times (once by CD, again by VHS to DVD and other similar moves in other areas) and the magnitude of the sales growth "humps" got smaller and smaller as people refused to be caught by the same ruse repeated over and over.
Nowadays, we have music-lovers who accept that their collections will, of necessity, comprise sections on different media formats and their audio system's structure and components are aligned to this mix of media with different source components - one for each media format.
At a guess, the OP wants to upgrade his CD player for two reasons: one, he has a decent collection of CDs with no intention of re-purchasing the same titles on some new medium; and two, he accepts the "multiple-medium" nature of his collection and is wanting to improve the reproduction quality for his CD collection.
And this why the suggestion was made to consider a CDT+DAC option, where the DAC could function as a digital source switch as well as converting digital source data into listenable analogue format - so that when any new titles are released and are only available on some medium other than CD, the replay infrastructure is geared - in part - to support a delta-based upgrade that integrates with the rest of the system via the DAC.
As a result, I have no intention of telling the lad that he is, in effect, an idiot for staying with what is an inferior media format - and that he should immediately re-think his decision to upgrade his CD player and, instead, spend a lot of his hard-earned cash on the infrastructure needed to play hi-res downloads and then to re-purchase all of the music he already has on CD.
Any purchase in times of technological flux can fall into one of three groupings:
1) Sticking to the technology that fits the media format (OP's request)
2) Abandon the media format and buy new technology and media (lots of posts)
3) Look for technology that can embrace/support both old and new
If this was NOT an audio question and NOT posted on PFM, which would you choose?
Dave